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I am the luckiest teacher in the world. I work with the most fantastic teachers and this year I’ve connected with some of the English teachers in other buildings in our district. Michelle and Kelly are awesome and we are so on the same page when it comes to tech and promoting English in our STEM-oriented schools.

Earlier this year Michelle and I were brainstorming ways to do more inter-academy activities in the humanities. Michelle mentioned that she used Googledocs to run some fun writing contests in her classes and I brought up the idea of taking that idea and extending it to all of our academies. Thus was born the first annual inter-academy writing contest!

We ended up holding a flash fiction contest. Students were charged with writing a 6 sentence story (no more, no less!) and were give about two weeks to enter. All entries were collected via the Googledoc survey. Students could enter as often as they wished until the deadline and we advertised the contest in all five of the academies. Within just a few days we had entries from every school!

After entries closed, we all popped into the Googledoc to choose the finalists. We wanted two finalists from each school and we were able to hide the column showing the name of the student who submitted the entry, so we were able to judge “blind”. Using the chat feature in Googledocs, we were able to discuss our choices as we made them. We ended up with 160 entries, which was INSANE. It took us a lot longer than we planned to narrow down the choices so we didn’t have the finalists chosen for the National Day on Writing, as planned. However, I’m ok with that because we managed to get so many students involved in the contest!

Our finalists have been chosen and the anonymous stories are now posted in a single googledocs survey. We posted the survey tonight and students are able to vote until Wednesday. The winner will receive two trophies- one for them to keep and one for their school trophy case. The school trophy will be passed to the winning school every year, like a Super Bowl trophy. Yay for writing!!